Annal:1993 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 1993. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1993 NBCC–Fiction winner
- Score: 10.43
Set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s, A Lesson Before Dying is an “enormously moving” (Los Angeles Times) novel of one man condemned to die for a crime he did not commit and a young man who visits him in his cell. In the end, the two men forge a bond as they both come to understand the simple heroism of resisting—and defying—the expected.
The Shipping News: A Novel
- 1994 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 1993 NBA–Fiction winner
- 1993 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 26.44
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx’s genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel.
Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a “head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair…features as bunched as kissed fingertips,” is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just deserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of…
- 1993 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.43
Made speechless by her eccentric father, the beautiful Etheria is traded for a piece of precious jade. Memory, her sister, tells her story, that of a childhood enlivened by Lewis Carroll and an orangutan named Dr. Johnson and envenomed by the pernicious courtship of Radulph Tubbs, Queen Victoria’s own Dragon of Industry. The novel travels from Oxford to Egypt where one million ibis mummies wait to be transformed into fertilizer, where Baconfield the architect will cause a pyramid to collapse, and where a scorned and bloated hunger artist who speaks in tongues…
Feather Crowns: A Novel
- 1993 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.43
Set in the apocalyptic atmosphere of 1900—a time when many Americans were looking for signs foretelling the end of the world—Feather Crowns is the story of a young woman who unintentionally creates a national sensation. A farm wife living near the small town of Hopewell, Kentucky, Christianna Wheeler gives birth to the first recorded set of quintuplets in North America.
Christie is suddenly thrown into a swirling storm of public attention. Thousands of strangers descend on her home, all wanting too see and touch the “miracle babies.” One visitor crawls…
Vindication: A Novel
- 1993 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.43
In this electrifying novel, Frances Sherwood re-creates the life and times of Mary Wollstonecraft, the trailblazing English feminist. Abetted by an unruly intelligence and an unquenchable romanticism, Sherwood’s Mary survives a brutal childhood to carve a courageous but always uncertain path for herself in a world of men. Rich historical settings from the chaos of Revolutionary Paris to the Bedlam insane asylum are the backdrop for the complex tale of her intellectual and emotional passions, lovers and friends, motherhood and marriage.
